


In Giving We Receive

by greenapple



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, M/M, Underage Sex, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-12
Updated: 2006-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:50:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenapple/pseuds/greenapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a work of fiction loosely based on the miniseries <em>Band of Brothers</em> and the fictional character of Doc Roe as portrayed therein.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.</p>
    </blockquote>





	In Giving We Receive

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction loosely based on the miniseries _Band of Brothers_ and the fictional character of Doc Roe as portrayed therein. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

He leaned you up against the side of the coop with the smell and the cooing of the chickens and he pressed at your bottom lip. Licking at it with the hard pad of his thumb and mumbling, Open up sha, open up. It was nothing at first; you thought him plain crazy. But the more he touched you there, rocking and pushing, the more you felt it, and you opened up for him. His dirty nails scratching at your teeth set your back itching and you were twitching forward into him before you knew what your own body was doing.

Children have their secrets together, games and playmagic, and you’d touched and been touched in a circle of three, a cousin and her friend. You’d rubbed your bed in the dark same as any. This was different. Here was a man, tall and toughshouldered like you’d grow to be, talking magic to you.

His thumb wiggled between your teeth and his knee between your legs, and you put your ear on his heart and rubbed your stiff boy prick on his thigh. Bit down and sucked on his thumb while he massaged your backside with his hand. He was saying, Come on little one, and encouraging you with little sounds and bits of prayer in French, all mixed up and sewed back together like patchwork. His heart was clapping and stomping underneath you, and you couldn’t breathe, you felt so sure you was gonna die.

He grabbed you hard on your face and made a choking sound and he bent down and pulled you up to him, breathed into your mouth. Under the sour and mudtaste was the rosewood flavor of the chapel and his breath filled up your lungs and the good feeling come over you with songs to God in your ears and you jerked and made high childish sounds of pleasure inside of his mouth.

He shoved his spitwet fingers inside your overalls and felt around your prick and balls, swept his hand below your belly and he clicked his tongue. His fingers curled soft around you and you felt like he was protecting you, giving you a place to hide inside him. He said, You didn’t.

His other hand felt all over your face, and you closed your eyes.

I thought sure you would, he said.

The screen door banged open behind you, on the other side of the coop, and mother yelled out for your brothers and for you. Better go see your mama, Boo, he said, and pushed you away. Your head knocked back against the wood and wire and then he pulled you back in by the wrist and stooped and kissed your cheek. Don’t you tell no one, hear? This is our special magic, he said into your ear, and spun your around and gave you a little push toward the house.

You ran away, dizzy and heatflushed, and in your ears the sound of your own name and his prayers rushing in like floodwater.

 

*

 

Afterwards, they would come to you, if they had a question or needed a rub, even though you didn’t know barely more than they. Your grandmama looked at you halfeyed and sniffed the air when you was around, like she could smell those boys on you, smell what you’d done, and you’d wash your hands in the river after, but she still knew. She pulled you aside one day, come home from frogging with boy Curtis from upriver. She took one look at you and grabbed your arm like you was gonna hop away from her she didn’t grab you quick, and told Curt she had business with you and gave him the Bad Eye. He couldn’t run out of there fast enough.

Everyone knew mamere was a powerful traiteuse, which is not anything like hoodoo or witchcraft, but mamere knew those, too. You are wastin God’s gifts, T. Gene, she said in her thickthroated way. And she grabbed you through your pants and you hollered and went a little white and sick. You wan give those boys somethin, first you need learn how to hold back. And she told you once you stopped thinking with your bibitte and opened up your heart, that God would speak through you.

So she taught you French and the Saints and how to pray, and you practiced on the boys of the parish; and at school they made you write out, I will not speak in French a hundred times for saying gris-gris and merde and j’aime.

 

*

 

She was a Negro girl. She was your first. Moon on the water and her white eyes in the dark. She took your hand and let you feel her, and you hurt with how much you wanted it. She said, I hear things about you.

And you thought, Jesus.

And she said, I hear you can heal people.

You didn’t ask her how she knew, because you’d never done more than stop the bleeding on a cut, once. You said, Yeah, I can do that, and you pushed your knuckle up inside her, and felt like a liar and a charlatan.

Not me’s that needin it, she said. My little brother.

Alright, alright, you said over the dark peak of her breast, and she spread her fat beautiful thighs and let you inside.

You never knew if the boy’s fever broke on its own, or if it were something you’d done, but you still thank the Lord for it all the same.

 

*

 

There’s no magic here, that’s what you’d thought. You try to keep them from bleeding to death before the real doctors can stitch them up back at battalion aid, that’s all you do. Give them a little care, gentle hands, and let them float above the pain for a while.

Until you’d seen what Captain Winters done in Carentan with the blind boy, and God hadn’t spoken through you in a long while, but you remember, and you know what it looks like when you see it.

It’s easy to be wrong, in a place like this. The Captain makes you remember that the kind word ain’t so little a thing. He makes you remember, that magic is only another word for love.

 

*

 

He pushes your back to the broken brick, calls you Doc and a hand on your shoulder too tight, too greedy to be friendly, although he probably means it to be.

You’re honest with him. Tell him, What needs fixing in you I can’t mend.

Snap smell of spirits when he laughs like he’s crying and maybe he is, too dark to see much. Answers by mashing his mouth to your chin, your cheek. Like a scared little boy, not the man he’d learned to be. Not the mask you all wear.

Take it off, you say, in your oldest language. Let it go.

You won’t say sir, not here where the rules are different and rank don’t matter. Won’t call him Nixon or Lewis heaven help you, because any fool knows names have magic, and he don’t have none to spare.

A scrape of whiskers against your jaw, and he says, I want to kiss you, in strange sharp tones, and it’s a moment, your hands on his back, rubbing raw knuckles into where his spine is, warm beneath the bulk of wet-smelling wool, before you realize. Parisian French like he learned it in school and never breathed it.

That’s okay, you say, in English again. Your dirty fingers digging for skin. His two hands on the wall beside you to keep himself from swaying, or maybe to keep you from running.

Someone walks by then, and he shoves you away and your elbow cracks against the wall, and the darkwater feeling like anger and like want rises up in you, dangerous in this place even though you’ve fought to keep it down, so hard, so long.

You keep silent and still with it, but as soon as the footsteps pass, you’re on your knees, no matter the cold, and twisting your fists in his trousers. Get your hand in there, and he prays, Holy shit and jumps back, but you won’t let him be. Your skin will warm to each other, give it time. Feel him soft in your fingers, you don’t care if it frightens him, don’t care what he thinks at all. You pull him out and warm him in your mouth. Tongue and suck at him until you can feel him changing shape.

Jesus, he whispers.

You pour sound over his cock, take him deep and yawn open over him.

His fingers shiver in your hair. You got maybe a couple minutes before the patrol passes by again, but you don’t even use it all; his legs tight from trying to hold himself up and in, and then his whole self pulled like on strings and him pulsing down your throat, back of your tongue and across your lips.

You stand up. Watch while he puts himself away, shaking and trying to keep quiet, his breath making moonshine fog on the air.

Christ, he says, like it’s just a word, and makes himself stand on his feet again.

You walk away before either of you can apologize for not being someone else.


End file.
